What is Creative Automation?

So, what is it?

Creative assets form the bulk of many marketing and ad campaigns. Every video, artwork or banner that goes into a campaign needs to be handcrafted by a team of creatives. While that’s doable when you only need a few assets, for most campaigns today, you need dozens of variations to accommodate different formats, markets and tactics, each incorporating different brand messages, languages and visuals.

That’s when creative automation comes into play. Creative automation uses technology to automate parts of creative production so you can create more assets in less time, with less effort. This is usually done through base design templates that, when combined with data, allow you to generate all the versions you need automatically and dynamically — without the manual work.

Creative automation isn’t about automating creativity — that’s something that should always be in the hands of creatives. But those repetitive, error-prone, time-consuming tasks like swapping out text, videos, images and audio across all formats? We don’t need or want to waste human talent on that.

What are the benefits of creative automation?

Creative automation makes the production of creative assets at scale faster and easier. But it doesn't stop there. By making your key processes more efficient, creative automation also frees up time to focus on what's important: creating and delivering the best possible content.

Better consistency

By automating repetitive tasks, every single asset will turn out pixel-perfect. Always on-brand across every market, language and channel.

Greater flexibility

Shorter turnaround times enable agile working. This allows you to act and adapt quickly: you can come up with new assets based on new insights and respond quickly. Asset production can match the speed of business.

Better performance

Being able to target your audience with creative assets that are specific to them helps you cut through the noise and capture their attention. After all, it’s like speaking to them directly, building trust and relevancy, which could lead to more conversion and better retention.

Better use of resources

With creative automation, marketers can roll out, test and optimise campaigns faster; creatives can waste less time on repetitive work and spend more time creating; and brand teams can ensure all assets are delivered as they should be across channels and teams, without the back-and-forth.

Who should use creative automation?

Multiple teams can benefit from creative automation, including:

Marketing

The better your message resonates with the audience, the higher the chances of campaign success. Creative automation allows you to create high-quality, hyper-relevant visual content and ads for every market, segment, channel and campaign phase. This way, you can even keep iterating and optimising your creative assets towards the best performance.

Creative

Creative automation gives the creative team the guarantee that every asset created is exactly as they envisioned — minus the soul-draining hours of crafting every single version. This gives them space to dream up new concepts and focus on the bigger picture.

Creative operations

Of course you want to deliver on time, within budget and maintain the creative standard. Creative automation helps you get there: all the manual things that can go wrong are now automated, except that you keep the flexibility to make changes. Everyone can now create the quality assets they need at any time, within minutes.

Brand

With creative automation, brand teams know that every asset produced is going to be on-brand. With typography, colours, layouts, animation and more captured in a template toolkit, there’s no more worrying about creative partners misinterpreting your brand guidelines.

Many leading brands have already embraced creative automation to boost their content production. Want to see how this could work for your brand?